Steps to create a rigged 1/12 scale RNLI lifeboatman

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Steps to create a rigged 1/12 scale RNLI lifeboatman

Postby Lesfac » Wed Jun 20, 2018 8:04 pm

I want to create a rigged RNLI lifeboatman that I can 3d print in various poses to put on my model boat.
The figure would have a safety helmet, waterproofs, life jacket and a webbing harness.
I have not seen any clothing close to this and I dont know if it would be possible to make the nessesary clothes.
Could some one tell me the steps involved to approach doing this.
I did have a quick go at producing something by exporting a naked figure and just painting on the baggy waterproofs and helmet in Sculptris. It printed ok but I know thats not the way to go about it.
I am very new to this.
Just the steps along the process would be useful. I can research the steps myself
Thanks in advance
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Re: Steps to create a rigged 1/12 scale RNLI lifeboatman

Postby RobBaer » Thu Jun 21, 2018 12:08 am

Just out of interest, does this image capture the kind of things you wish to make?
http://www.sosmarine.com/product/sos-ma ... fejackets/

If so, the general procedure in Blender is to add the MakeHuman MakeClothes plugin and model and texture the items in Blender then publish them back to MakeHuman using the MakeClothes plugin. Your model meshes should be all quads, should contain low pole counts at each vertex, and for the "equipment-like" clothes you will probably be interested in looking into "rigid clothing" approaches.

VScorpionC may have some good tutorials for making clothes in general, but I don't recall for sure that she has one on rigid clothing.
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Re: Steps to create a rigged 1/12 scale RNLI lifeboatman

Postby Lesfac » Thu Jun 21, 2018 8:02 am

Thank you for your reply Robbaer, I will check it out.
Attached is a photo of the kit the crew wear. Its a bit low res and they are not wearing helmets but its the best I could find.
dunlaoghiarelifeboatcrew.jpg
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Re: Steps to create a rigged 1/12 scale RNLI lifeboatman

Postby Aranuvir » Thu Jun 21, 2018 8:33 am

Just some remarks: you do not necessarily have to use the MakeClothes tool if you do not want to reuse the clothing on other models, e.g. for a whole lifeboat crew. The advantages of MakeClothes are re-usability inside MakeHuman and the clothing gets rigged to the exported human model for posing. The downsides are a tedious fitting process and limitations to the geometry (for example see here: viewtopic.php?f=20&t=15990).
To get your work done, you can use any program you like. Blender is fine, since it is free and provides a full pipeline from modeling/sclupting -> texturing/shading -> rigging/posing/animating -> rendering, though in a more professional pipeline you might want use some specific programs for certain tasks, like Z-Brush/Sculptris for sculpting or Substance Painter for textures. (some of the steps might be dispensable for 3D printing :) )
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Re: Steps to create a rigged 1/12 scale RNLI lifeboatman

Postby punkduck » Thu Jun 21, 2018 7:47 pm

Hi

I should add a few additional sentences. I guess for 3d-printing some of "our" (I mean the people doing the most assets) preferred methods will not be the way you should do it. Of course you can use MakeHuman for a crew wearing uniforms, because the clothes will fit all sizes and that will help a bit.

But you should take a few points into consideration:

You want to do 1/12 scale, that is, compared to what I'm doing sometimes (model trains, 1/87 scale) quite big.

So you need detailed structures and a lot of geometry. Especially the look of the overalls and boots must be similar, otherwise your printed models will be smooth and clean wearing some kind of skin-tight suit. Something that might appear a bit weird in the end :?

When we create assets with wrinkles only for Blender, we just make a normalmap which simply fakes the wrinkles. But this does not make sense for a printed model ...

RobBaer mentions textures. I don't know if you have a color 3d-printer supporting textures, if you don't have such a device make them in one color. The rest is done afterwards in the same method you paint your boat ;)

Here is my idea: also I'm not a big fan of Meshlab, I just learned from Elvaerwyn that it is possible to use the output of Meshlab for MakeClothes. In Meshlab you can model a mesh like sculpting as far as I understand, at least for the overall and boots with all the wrinkles it makes sense. Especially when you need no texture! In Meshlab use triangles for the output, because the algorithm converting it into quads might distort your work.

MakeClothes accepts triangles but then ONLY triangles are allowed. Most people don't know that, but it works, I've done it a few times with different assets.

For the vests and helmets you may take another method, because they don't have these wrinkles. Maybe in this case use only Blender including MakeClothes and then work with quads ... (as mentioned above) but I would start with the clothes near the body.

If you have printed geometry allready then you will know the typical problems like holes, faces normals, self-intersections etc. ... if not, it isn't that easy :shock:

Greetings
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Re: Steps to create a rigged 1/12 scale RNLI lifeboatman

Postby Aranuvir » Thu Jun 21, 2018 9:13 pm

MakeClothes accepts triangles but then ONLY triangles are allowed. Most people don't know that, but it works, I've done it a few times with different assets.

Hm, that's interesting! Indeed, MakeClohtes doesn't complain on an all tris mesh, though MakeHuman coughs heavily and refuses to load the mesh, raising an "Incompatible mesh topology" runtime error. Not sure why it fails for me but not for you, Punkduck. I've tested it with current master and I'm quite sure we haven't touched this particular code during Python3 transition. This is either a bug or was some old attempt to overcome the quads only limitation...
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Re: Steps to create a rigged 1/12 scale RNLI lifeboatman

Postby punkduck » Thu Jun 21, 2018 9:30 pm

Aranuvir wrote:
MakeClothes accepts triangles but then ONLY triangles are allowed. Most people don't know that, but it works, I've done it a few times with different assets.

Hm, that's interesting! Indeed, MakeClohtes doesn't complain on an all tris mesh, though MakeHuman coughs heavily and refuses to load the mesh, raising an "Incompatible mesh topology" runtime error. Not sure why it fails for me but not for you, Punkduck. I've tested it with current master and I'm quite sure we haven't touched this particular code during Python3 transition. This is either a bug or was some old attempt to overcome the quads only limitation...


In Blender you have to get rid of all vertices with more than 8 poles ... okay. Nothing new.

The other trick is:

Edit the .mhclo file and set max_pole e.g. to 17 or even higher until the error message disappears ... even that Blender explained that it has only 8 poles ...
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Re: Steps to create a rigged 1/12 scale RNLI lifeboatman

Postby Aranuvir » Thu Jun 21, 2018 9:58 pm

punkduck wrote:In Blender you have to get rid of all vertices with more than 8 poles ... okay. Nothing new.
The other trick is:
Edit the .mhclo file and set max_pole e.g. to 17 or even higher until the error message disappears ... even that Blender explained that it has only 8 poles ...

Well, that's even more weird. I thought the max pole limitation was fixed and the right number of poles gets calculated and written to the mhclo file directly. And this should not influence the quads only limitation. Thing seem to go seriously wrong here. We need further investigation.
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